hPVI 2019, Senate edition

It’s time for the bi-annual release of hPVI, Minnesota’s Oldest And Most Beloved Legislative District Metric™.

For those unfamiliar with hPVI, it’s a partisan voting index for state legislative districts that I’ve been compiling in one form or another for over nine (!) years; where have you been?

In what follows there will be a graph and some tables and I’ll do some analysis, the actual hPVIs can be found at the bottom of the post for those who don’t want any context.

For more information on what hPVI is see the explainer (from the 2017 edition, but still relevant as an explainer). For programmatic access to the numbers see the hPVI API. There is also an hPVI LeftMN sub-site now which can be found at hpvi.left.mn.

Senate hPVI Histogram

If you’re unfamiliar with histograms, the bars are buckets of districts, each bucket being 10 hPVI wide. Meaning one bucket contains all the Even to D+10 districts, one bucket contains all the D+11 to D+20 districts, one bucket contains all the D+21 to D+30 districts and on and on. The height of the bars is represents the number of districts in each bucket.

Right now there are exactly as many Even to D+10 districts as Even to R+10 districts, a more than modest departure from the last iteration of hPVI. In the 2017 version there were 21 Even to R+10 districts and 15 Even to D+10 districts.

Looking at the next set of buckets, there were 16 R+11 to R+20 districts in 2017 there are 15 now and there were only five D+11 to D+20 districts in 2017 there are seven now. Additionally, there are two seats over R+20 this iteration, there were none last time.

Because describing what is essentially a table of information with words is not the most exciting use of words, here’s how the two versions compare in their proper table form:

Year

> R+20

R+20 – R+11

R+10 – Even

Even – D+10

D+11 – D+20

> D+20

Total GOP

Total DFL

2019

2

15

16

16

7

11

33

34

2017

0

16

21

15

5

10

37

30

Heading into 2020 three seats moved into the “safe” column for the DFL (districts greater than D+10) while the GOP added a single district in this category. Likely of more consequence, one district got added to the “marginal” DFL column (Even – D+10) while the GOP lost five districts from that column.

The aggregate results show that the Senate is very much in play in 2020, with more districts now favoring the DFL than the GOP.

Before we further break down which districts are actually in play, let’s look at what different hPVI advantages mean in terms of likelihood of the party with that advantage winning the district. As an example, Senator Scott Jensen’s SD47 has an hPVI of R+7. This means that the Republicans have a roughly 90% chance of holding onto that district in the 2020 election.

hPVI Edge

Win Probability

12

99%

10

97%

7

90%

5

80%

3

70%

2

65%

1

55%

A popular method for rating a political districts likelihood of being won by one party or another is to label the district as Toss-up, Lean, Likely, or Safe. Using the above table as reference we can create such labels for each district.

I’ve defined these labels for hPVI as: an hPVI of greater than 10, which translates to at least a 97% chance of victory, is classified as safe, a district with an hPVI between ten and five, at least an 80% chance of victory, is likely, five to two is lean and two and less toss-up.

Using that classification method here’s how the districts are distributed.

Safe GOP

Likely GOP

Lean GOP

Toss-up

Lean DFL

Likely DFL

Safe DFL

17

7

4

8

7

6

18

28

8

31

Those eight Toss-up districts will be some of the most contested Senate districts next year, they are:

District

Name

Party

hPVI

4

Kent Eken

DFL

R+1

14

Jerry Relph

R

R+1

25

David Senjem

R

D+1

28

Jeremy Miller

R

EVEN

34

Warren Limmer

R

R+1

37

Jerry Newton

DFL

D+1

38

Roger Chamberlain

R

R+1

39

Karin Housley

R

R+1

Also, there are five Senators that sit in districts classified as leaning (or greater) to the party they are not in, and I would be surprised if these aren’t the five most targeted districts in the state:

District

Name

Party

hPVI

26

Carla Nelson

R

D+2

27

Dan Sparks

DFL

R+3

44

Paul Anderson

R

D+10

56

Dan Hall

R

D+3

58

Matt Little

DFL

R+6

Senate hPVI Table Analysis

This edition marked a continuation of trends from the last edition. In the last edition greater Minnesota, specifically many of the Iron range districts, had significant movement towards the GOP. While those trends largely continued in this edition, they were less pronounced.

Likewise in the last edition suburban Minnesota had some modest movement towards the DFL, that trend continued in this edition. There are now eight Republican Senators who sit in districts with an hPVI of R+1 or less and of those four are in districts that are actually Democratic leaning, including Paul “Lock Of The Cycle To Lose His Seat” Anderson’s SD44 at D+10(!)!

Here’s a fun fact, Dan Hall’s SD56 is now as Democratic leaning as David Tomassoni’s SD6.